SVAutobiography Dynamic: The ultimate luxury land yacht

Not so long ago, the “Special Vehicle Operations” unit was responsible for putting cherry pickers on the back and snowploughs on the front of Land Rovers – glamorous it wasn’t, says Andrew English in The Daily Telegraph. But these days no one can afford to ignore the profitable business of indulging the super-wealthy. Now the SVO will take a basic £75,850 Range Rover, for example, and turn it into this SVAutobiography Dynamic, separating your wallet from £132,800 in the process. For that you get a motor that looks like “the wheels a James Bond baddie might own” with an interior like a “tart’s boudoir”.

It’s a “very comfortable carriage” for four, says Steve Cropley in Autocar, and to drive it gets better the faster you go. The engine “revs smoothly with a delicious V8 growl”, the eight-speed automatic gearbox is an “excellent ally”, and when you power out of corners you’ll find it hard to believe that the car weighs two-and-a-half tonnes.

SVO wrote itself a tricky brief, says Ben Miller in Car magazine: to up the dynamism of the already impressive Range Rover Sport SVR and improve on the luxury of “the world’s favourite four-wheel-drive land yacht”. Yet it succeeded and the result is “the fastest, most dynamic” Range Rover yet. “Handsome, awesomely capable, a joy to drive and shot through with charm, the SVAutobiography Dynamic is a great car.” The standard Autobiography with the supercharged V8, however, is nearly £30k less expensive. This model is strictly for “indulgent types”.